Antenna House Formatter V6

Format HTML and XML for print and PDF using the power of Antenna House Formatter

Style your content with XSL-FO or CSS

Hyphenation Support for over 50 Languages

Formatter Includes standards compliant MathML and SVG rendering engines with an option for a CGM engine

Formatter Now Supports Indic languages and Embedding Multimedia

Antenna House Formatter is a mature software that continues to evolve and is in production with several large corporations. Formatter is a leader in its class due to its performance in high volume environments, compatibility with Windows, Solaris, Linux and breadth of customizations.

Formatter is the missing piece that web developers have been searching for to go from web/HTML to print and PDF with properly formatted pages and documents.

Building on the strengths of the CSS3 specification and Antenna House XSL Formatter, Antenna House Formatter has added the capability that now enables web designers to use CSS to add print and PDF output to their systems by using all the features and functionality that Antenna House has developed during the past 8 years as the supplier of the most powerful XSL-FO formatting software available.

In addition to the powerful formatting functions by using XSL-FO, Antenna House Formatter has added the ability for formatting HTML and XML with CSS.

AH Formatter formats XSL Formatting Objects (XSL-FO), XML with XSL stylesheet, or HTML with CSS. The formatted result will be displayed in GUI and outputted or printed to PDF. (Display and printing are available only with the Windows version). The work flow is as shown below.

Formatter Work Flow Diagram:

When an (X)HTML document is inputted, AH Formatter formats it immediately using a default HTML stylesheet.

When an XML document or an (X)HTML document with a CSS are inputted, AH Formatter formats it immediately.

When an XSL Formatting Object is inputted, AH Formatter formats it immediately.

When an XML document and an XSL stylesheet are inputted, AH Formatter transforms them to XSL Formatting Object using XSLT Processor and formats the XSL Formatting Object or XHTML.

New Enhancements of AH Formatter V6.2 from AH Formatter V6.1 are as follows:

Now users can select the stylesheet language and content strategy that best suits their business needs.

XSL-FO has long been recognized as the standard for formatting XML for print and PDF and CSS as the standard for displaying HTML on the web. The missing piece for web developers has always been how to go from web/HTML to print and PDF with properly formatted pages and documents. V6.2 is the answer.

Building on the strengths of the CSS3 specification and Antenna House XSL Formatter, Antenna House Formatter V6.2 has added the capability that now enables web designers to use CSS to add print and PDF output to their systems by using all the features and functionality that Antenna House has developed during the past 8 years as the supplier of the most powerful XSL-FO formatting software availalbe.

In addition to the powerful formatting functions by using XSL-FO available with the V4.3, Antenna House V6.2 has added the ability for formatting HTML and XML with CSS.

Antenna House Formatter V6.2 offers all the features (GUI, support for over 50 languages, PDF generation), W3C compliance, extensions, the significantly enhanced performance, unlimited document size and SVG support, vector support for EMF and WMF, new output capabilities through the new Barcode Generator Option, MIF Creator Option, INX Creator Option and CGM Option, MathML native drawing,support for SVG output by SVG Output Option, PANTONE® color support by PANTONE® Option and Web Interface for Formatter to support the use of AH Formatter via the Internet, the two-pass formatting that makes it possible to format huge documents, high quality EPS embedding in PDF, the enhanced PDF features, AcroForms, PDF/A, PDF1.7, PostScript output, and numerous other enhancements by AXF extension. New to AH Formatter is the XPS Output Option that enables the outout of XPS (XML Paper SpecificationI) files.

The six products are prepared according to the formatting capability of AH Formatter V6.2. Please see also AH Formatter Family.

Compliant with XSL 1.1

Corresponds to XSL 1.1 which is a XSL-FO specification. Antenna House Formatter faithfully implements quite almost elements of the XSL specification and properties.

High speed

Format virtually any size document

Antenna House Formatter can format a document of virtually any size whether it is a publication, tens of thousands of invoices, reports or personalized one to one documents.

Supports PDF/X and PDF/A

Antenna House Formatter supports PDF/X. PDF/X is a specification that places much value on exchanging date and defined by ISO for printing purpose. PDF/A is a format for long-term preservation of an electronic document and it is also defined by ISO.

Accessible PDF

Antenna House Formatter can generate the Tagged PDF for enhancing the accessibility to persons with sight problems. This is a function indispensable to comply with Section 508, the law of the United States

enforced on June 21, 2001.

Integration Interface

Antenna House provides Command line interface, .NET interface, COM interface, Java interface and C++/C interface. The various interfaces make for easy system integration of Formatter with web applications, content management systems, and other software products.

The .NET interface and the COM interface are available for Windows only.

Direct Printer output

In Windows version, it’s possible to output the formatted result directly to the printer without passing through PDF. It’s also possible to get the formatted result and print it immediately by using GUI.

Supports the embedding of PDF into PDF

An arbitrary page of other PDF can be embedded into PDF.

Compliant with CSS

Supports CSS2.1 and CSS3. Page models of CSS3 is also supported, now that high-quality page formatting will be available.

Passes Acid2

AH Formatter has passed the Acid2 test published by “The Web Standards Project (WaSP)” that measures the conforming level to CSS.

PANTONE® Color Support

AH Formatter provides the ability for more than 1000 PANTONE® Colors to be converted into RGB or CMYK values automatically by using AH Formatter PANTONE® Option. Possible to specify the PANTONE® colors for separation color (spot color) simply by putting only the name of the PANTONE® colors in FO.

Web Interface for Formatter

Web Interface V3.0 for Formatter works with both CSS and XSL Formatter. The Web Interface reduces the amount of development effort necessary to integrate Formatter into a internet based solution.

Table Auto Layout

AH Formatter supports table-layout=”auto.” in the XSL-FO specification, which is not supported by many of the formatting software. This function arranges the table layout suitably without specifying the width of a cell. It’s suitable for almost all tables which do not require the strict value of the width, and is very convenient. When the formatting speed poses a problem, please specify table-layout=”fixed” instead and specify fixed width in all cells.

High quality PDF for SVG, MathML, EMF and WMF

Vector information for SVG, MathML, EMF and WMF is retained in PDF, thus enhancing the quality of output images and meeting the increasing demand for delivery of vectors in the output.

Formatter is able to draw high-resolution MathML in PDF. The lite version of Formatter also is able to use the MATHML plugin.

Possible to get the .NET native parser output

With the .NET Interface when XSL-FO is generated from XML and XSL using an XSLT processor that transformation can now be passed directly and seamlessly to Formatter without passing it through a temporary file first.

The .NET and the COM interfaces can now also get the DOM directly without passing through a temporary file. This has the effect of slightly improving performance.

Multilingual Language

V5 supports almost any language which is supported by Unicode including Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Japanese (Hiragana and Katakana), Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Hangul, Arabic, Hebrew and Thai. It offers the abilities to write in vertical mode, to run the text from right to left as in Arabic and Hebrew and also to create multilingual documents with language mixtures on the same page and even on the same line.

Possible to hyphenate over 40 or more languages

The former “Hyphenation Option” is now a standard part of Formatter. The Hyphenation function integrates the very powerful hyphenation algorithms from Computer Hyphenation Ltd., which enhances the quality of hyphenation and greatly simplifies setting up Formatter to hyphenate over 40 different languages.

Please see “Font Setting” for supported fonts.
In addition, fonts are not included in the Windows version.

Standard 14 Fonts in non-Windows version have the metrics information file only. They do not contain the file of the outline information. If you want to embed these fonts to PDF or PS file, please prepare whole fonts by yourself.

Please confirm the necessary environment variables at “Environment Variable” in this manual.

Please confirm the installed modules at “Installed Modules” in this manual.

The printing function on the Windows version depends on Windows-based printer drivers.

In Windows version, the run time library of Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 is required. This run time library is installed when you have the product installed on your system. It is also possible to download it from the following site When you need the package of the library separately.